tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:/blogs/blog?p=3
Blog
2022-11-26T18:46:47-05:00
Bob McParland
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tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/7111030
2022-11-26T18:46:47-05:00
2023-10-16T10:55:08-04:00
Poetry Publications
<p>"Letter from Paterson to Mr. Updike," "First Inaugural" (Paterson Poetry Review, Spring 2023).</p>
<p>"I Bring My Winter Lament to William Carlos Williams' Doorstep" (The Red Wheelbarrow, October 2022)</p>
<p>"To Thoreau," (Bluebird Word, September 2022)</p>
<p>"Taps," (Visions International, September 2022)</p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042400
2022-11-26T18:42:44-05:00
2022-11-26T18:42:44-05:00
Haunted
<p>Bob McParland's story "Voyshakov's Malady" appeared in a November issue of the magazine "Haunted."</p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6965660
2022-05-06T21:57:15-04:00
2022-11-26T18:42:28-05:00
Outdoor Concert Planned for July 9
<p>Bob McParland and Mike Baron will perform an outdoor concert in Wyckoff, N.J. on the grounds of the Faith Reformed Church, 530 Sicomac Avenue beginning at 7:00 P.M.. <img src="//d10j3mvrs1suex.cloudfront.net/u/431109/bfc19f3824fa4e792a8188800d17b42bbfe6ff6a/original/dscn0213-01.jpg/!!/meta:eyJzcmNCdWNrZXQiOiJiemdsZmlsZXMifQ==/b:W10=.jpg" class="size_l justify_center border_" /></p>
<p><img src="//d10j3mvrs1suex.cloudfront.net/u/431109/0f1f6c025adeb898957ecc3e870beff7dbe77207/original/dscn0214-01.jpg/!!/meta:eyJzcmNCdWNrZXQiOiJiemdsZmlsZXMifQ==/b:W10=.jpg" class="size_l justify_center border_" /></p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6579693
2022-05-06T21:53:08-04:00
2022-05-06T21:53:08-04:00
Preparing An Album
<p>A new recording is being developed in Warwick, New York and in Morris County, New Jersey.</p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042421
2019-10-29T12:46:33-04:00
2019-12-19T07:31:46-05:00
Concert on November 2 - Bob McParland with Mike Baron
<p>Bob McParland and Mike Baron (drums/percussion) will perform on Saturday, November 2 at Christian Singles/ The Barn at 530 Sicomac Avenue, Wyckoff, New Jersey. $5 admission. Doors open at 6:30 P.M.. The music begins after 8:00 P.M..</p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042420
2019-10-01T13:55:24-04:00
2021-08-01T12:01:15-04:00
Concert on October 19
<p>Bob McParland and Mike Baron will perform at the Coffeehouse at the Linden Reformed Church, 200 North Wood, Linden, New Jersey on Saturday, October 19, 2019 at 7:00 P.M.. </p>
<p><img src="//d10j3mvrs1suex.cloudfront.net/u/431109/bfc19f3824fa4e792a8188800d17b42bbfe6ff6a/original/dscn0213-01.jpg/!!/b%3AWyJyZXNpemU6NDc1eDM1NiJd.jpg" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="DSCN0213_01.JPG" height="356" width="475" /></p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042419
2019-10-01T13:49:48-04:00
2021-06-26T15:58:42-04:00
Rock Music Imagination Published
<p><em><em>Rock Music Imagination</em> has been published.</em></p>
<p><em><img src="//d10j3mvrs1suex.cloudfront.net/u/431109/087bb86c33df084a22d913884a0dd911a0ed44ac/original/rock-music-imagination-9781498588539.jpg/!!/b%3AWyJyZXNpemU6MzE1eDUwMSJd.jpg" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="Rock_Music_Imagination_9781498588539.jpg" height="501" width="315" /></em></p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042418
2019-07-27T12:54:58-04:00
2020-06-11T10:15:24-04:00
New Rock Music Books
<p><em>Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's 50 Year Quest: Music to Change the World </em>and <em>Finding God in the Devil's Music </em>(ed. Alex Di Blasi and Robert McParland) have been published. </p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042417
2018-12-10T13:18:29-05:00
2019-12-19T07:31:46-05:00
Bestseller Is On the Way!
<p><strong><strong><em>Bestseller: A Century of America's Favorite Books </em></strong>is on the way! </strong>The new book will be published on December 15. The book lists more than 100 years of bestselling books. It explores the careers of top authors and looks at the role of books in American cultural history. </p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042416
2018-08-05T06:16:09-04:00
2019-12-19T07:31:46-05:00
Interview on Science Fiction in Classic Rock Music
<p><em>Science Fiction in Classic Rock </em>is featured in this month's issue of <em>Digital Arts Live</em>. This lavishly illustrated online magazine includes an interview with Robert McParland, author of <em>Science Fiction in Classic Rock: Musical Explorations of Space, Technology, and the Imagination, 1967-1982. </em>See digitalartslive.com for a free look at this science fiction art magazine.</p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042415
2018-08-05T06:08:34-04:00
2019-12-19T07:31:46-05:00
Interview on Myth and Magic in Heavy Metal Music
<p>What is a folksinger doing writing about heavy metal? Popular music comes with a variety of sounds and takes on many shapes and forms. <em>Heavy-Metal Rules.com</em>, an online magazine from Canada, will review <em>Myth and Magic in Heavy Metal Music</em>, which focuses on how mythical thinking and imagination continues to have a significant role in popular music. <em>Myth and Magic in Heavy Metal Music</em> is available from online book sellers, including Amazon and Barnes and Noble. </p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042414
2018-08-05T05:59:20-04:00
2019-12-19T07:31:46-05:00
Concert On August 4
<p>Bob McParland brought his music with drummer Mike Baron to Wyckoff, New Jersey on Saturday, August 4. A pot luck supper preceded the show. </p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042413
2017-04-05T03:36:32-04:00
2022-04-05T16:23:46-04:00
Concert April 22 Linden, New Jersey
<p>Bob McParland and Mike Baron (drums) will perform at the Reformed Church of Linden, New Jersey, 7:30 P.M. on April 22, 2017.</p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042412
2016-10-04T11:33:42-04:00
2022-09-08T12:42:01-04:00
Steinbeck Book Published
<p><strong><em>Citizen Steinbeck</em></strong> is now available.</p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042410
2016-06-05T13:58:27-04:00
2019-12-19T07:31:46-05:00
Citizen Steinbeck in Time for Election 2016
<p>The new book on John Steinbeck will be published in October 2016. <em>Citizen Steinbeck</em> is now available for pre-order. </p>
<p><img src="//d10j3mvrs1suex.cloudfront.net/u/431109/10e9e26c503fb0ec4718e80f5f63837068f704e0/original/steinbeck.jpg/!!/b%3AWyJyZXNpemU6MzMzeDQ5OSJd.jpg" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="steinbeck__.jpg" height="499" width="333" /></p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042409
2015-05-23T13:40:50-04:00
2019-12-19T07:31:46-05:00
Beyond Gatsby in U.S. Libraries
<p><strong><em>Beyond Gatsby</em></strong> has entered more than 100 U.S. libraries, including Chicago Public Library, St. Louis Public Library, New Yorkl Public Library. </p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042408
2015-05-12T09:43:20-04:00
2019-12-19T07:31:46-05:00
Mark Twain's Audience Tops 100
<p><em><strong>Mark Twain's Audience</strong></em> appears in more than 100 academic libraries worldwide, according to World Cat.</p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042407
2015-04-09T12:31:21-04:00
2019-12-19T07:31:46-05:00
Beyond Gatsby Published
<p><em><img src="//d10j3mvrs1suex.cloudfront.net/u/431109/d19fdca7b0fa707a9e6573b2d7f82d35f6598c46/original/beyondgatsby3-1-resized.jpg/!!/b%3AWyJyZXNpemU6NDAweDYwMCJd.jpg" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="BeyondGatsby3_1__resized.jpg" height="600" width="400" /> Beyond Gatsby</em> - a book on the 1920s in America and American authors- is now available worldwide.</p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042406
2014-11-21T06:27:39-05:00
2019-12-19T07:31:46-05:00
Book Reception- November 20, 2014 at Felician College
<p>New books from Robert McParland and Carl Lane were featured at a reception in the lobby of Felician College's Obal Hall on Thursday, November 20 from 4:00-6:00 P.M..</p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042405
2014-11-08T04:16:57-05:00
2019-12-19T07:31:46-05:00
Beyond Gatsby- Book On the Way in April 2015
<p>Woody Allen, <em>Boardwalk Empire</em>, <em>Gatsby</em>.... The 1920s is back in popular culture and comes alive again in this book: <em>Beyond Gatsby</em>, which will be published in April 2015.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><img src="//d10j3mvrs1suex.cloudfront.net/u/431109/e9577f9ac1193ab2797c15852e63c127d66e8db6/original/beyondgatsby3-1.jpg/!!/b%3AWyJyZXNpemU6NDMyeDY0OCJd.jpg" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="BeyondGatsby3_1_.jpg" height="648" width="432" /></p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042404
2014-11-05T03:20:51-05:00
2019-12-19T07:31:46-05:00
Mark Twain Book Publication October 2014
<p><em><strong>Mark Twain's Audience</strong></em> has been published.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><img src="//d10j3mvrs1suex.cloudfront.net/u/431109/162ebd0ac822449d3e0d70edfefb37eb6575156c/original/41zxkypuvjl-bo2-204-203-200-pisitb-sticker.jpg/!!/b%3AWyJyZXNpemU6MzAweDMwMCJd.jpg" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="41zXkYPuvjL__BO2_204_203_200_PIsitb-sticker-.jpg" height="300" width="300" /></p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042403
2014-04-19T13:28:53-04:00
2019-12-19T07:31:46-05:00
Rock Music Studies Launched- Book Reviews
<p>Bob McParland's book reviews are featured in the new Rock Studies Journal.</p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042402
2014-02-09T12:02:34-05:00
2021-07-27T10:42:14-04:00
The Beatles Anniversary (Essay, Bob McParland (c) 2006
<p><strong><span style="text-decoration:underline">Yesterday: The Beatles, Narrative and Memory</span></strong></p>
<p> The Beatles, possibly the most popular and influential music act of the past century, wrote and sounded a cultural moment. From 1963 to 1970, the years of their recording output, they were engaged in significant cultural work. Their artistry and awareness was deeply in tune with a transformation of culture and popular music. In memory, their music, image, lyrics, and ideas have become a cultural legacy that remains steadily with us.</p>
<p> Because of their continuing relevance, it is necessary to explore how we remember The Beatles. Memory studies provide us with a lens through which we can investigate their cultural impact upon the generation of listeners who first experienced them and those who encountered them later. The Beatles signify a generation: the wonder, passion, and energy of people who met a world of change during the 1960’s. One recreates the sixties in listening to The Beatles. They act as a catalyst for remembering this time in specific ways. The Beatles recall for many people the vitality, dreams, and struggles of a not too distant past: a time of dramatic upheaval characterized by issues of war, civil rights, and shifting lifestyles. The significance of memory to The Beatles themselves and to their listeners will be examined through theories of memory from Pierre Nora’s <em>Realms of Memory</em> and Dominick La Capra’s considerations of holocaust memory. The work of The Beatles calls us to reexamine the points that Nora and La Capra have made. <strong><span style="text-decoration:underline"> </span></strong></p>
<p> In this essay, I will first examine how the theme of memory appears as continually relevant to The Beatles in their writing and music. Memory is at the center of many of the songs of The Beatles. From “Yesterday” to “In My Life” and “Penny Lane,” The Beatles set out maps of personal memory. As The Beatles memorialized their personal past, they created a treasure of memories for their listeners.</p>
<p> Considering this impact, in the next part of this essay, I will offer the view that audiences have used the music of The Beatles to remember things they have lived through. Each Beatles song, becoming popular, has acted as a cultural marker for its audience, a thread amid the pattern of yesterday. As a widespread cultural phenomenon, The Beatles participated in creating history and consciousness. The Beatles’ songs, as literary texts, continue to act as a framework for memory and have a role in the formation of cultural memory as they enter public discourse. The participation of their audience records memory as their lives intersect with The Beatles’ songs. Thus, their music has entered what Pierre Bourdieu refers to as “the cultural field,” a unique space of family frames, personal life-histories, and class and aesthetic differences. [note 3] Listeners to The Beatles continually re-read them, producing social knowledge and discourse. They circulate meaning through interpretation of common texts and celebrate deeply felt emotions that emerge from memory. The original Beatles audience recalls with what Raymond Williams has called “a particular community of experience” and “the structure of feeling.” Subsequent audiences of The Beatles interact with this recollection of a “common element.” [note 4]</p>
<p>Finally, we will look at the continuing importance of The Beatles at the present time. In doing so, we can see that The Beatles provided a public text that continues to be widely circulated and reconstructed. Their music has become a site of memory. This is true for people who lived through the 1960s as well as for a generation of listeners who have been born afterward. Parents and their children have discovered in The Beatles a common bond. Even as The Beatles, in their time together, transformed and recast themselves, today The Beatles are recast for new audiences in multiple ways. From their pop songs of 1964 through the innovations of <em>Sergeant Pepper</em> (1967) and <em>The White Album</em> (1968) to their closing days of <em>Abbey Road</em> and <em>Let It Be</em>, The Beatles changed visually and musically. Now, through the remastering of their recordings and films, the sale of t-shirts and memorabilia, and concerts by Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, The Beatles’ legacy is reconstructed and passed on to future generations.</p>
<p> These new placements of The Beatles texts have prompted re-readings of The Beatles and revisions of cultural memory. This practice is consistent with the revisions of history and recovery of areas of history that have brought increasing emphasis upon memory. Pierre Nora speaks of the sense of “belonging, collective consciousness {…} memory and identity.”[ note 6] He suggests for our period the term “the age of commemoration” (4). As Nora puts it, “the most continuous or permanent feature of the modern world is no longer continuity or permanence but change” (5). [note 7] For The Beatles themselves, rapid change or an “acceleration of history,” to use Nora’s term, appears to have prompted a desire for memory that appears in several of their songs. This may also be true of their audience, for whom a reinvention of The Beatles texts in the <em>Beatles Anthology</em>, the Beatles’ <em>Love</em> album, or anticipated digital availability brings yesterday alive again in fresh and new ways. The relative permanence and familiarity of The Beatles enables their audience to cope with change. [note 8]</p>
<p> In his introduction to <em>Realms of Memory</em>, Pierre Nora tells us that “history is needed when people no longer live in memory but recall the past through the assistance of documents that help to recall it” [note 1] Much about The Beatles is within living memory but the band also exists in recorded documents that trigger personal memory. The recordings of The Beatles today continue in a lively conversation with culture. Their work continues to be represented and documented in new media forms and is soon to be digitized for today’s listeners. The Beatles have crossed boundaries and cultures. They have entered “social frames” of memory. Because of this it is important for us to consider how memory is embodied and enacted in the image, the lyrics, and the music of The Beatles. Then, by setting them within their historical and social context we may further investigate through memory theories their lasting impact on their audience. That is the work of this essay.</p>
<p> I.</p>
<p> The Beatles crafted many of their songs in an attitude of recollection and often set their lyrics in the past tense. Here we arrive at la Capra’s first two points: the relation between authorial intention and the text and the relation of the author’s life and the text. La Capra argues that life and text may challenge one another in a complex interaction (Rethinking 60-61). For The Beatles, the increasing pressure of the music industry at the peak of their success called for a turn toward memory which helped them to situate themselves. The Beatles obviously intended to create pop music. Their primary thrust was sheer creativity, an impulse to produce songs. At first they rewrote Little Richard and Elvis and the rock and roll of the late 1950s. Then they participated in writing an integral portion of the soundtrack of the 1960s. </p>
<p>The vision and musical sound of The Beatles shifted during their time together. While John Lennon, in particular, moved toward songs that expressed a socio-political awareness, The Beatles appear to generally not have intended to make large social statements. We can gain some perspective on what they were trying to say through their interviews. Biographers on The Beatles have speculated on the intentions that lay behind their songs. However, a search for the relation between authorial intention and the Beatles’ texts has to be guided by a close reading of their own comments about their craft.</p>
<p>There is a relation between the lives of The Beatles and their songs. However, we may never know to what extent John Lennon’s wry imagination transformed the encounters which prompted songs like “Norwegian Wood.” Clearly, his imaginative playfulness sends his narrator to crawl off to sleep in the bath to elude his erstwhile love, as he sings, “Or should I say, she once had me.” The Beatles bring to this song music with a nostalgic quality. This song is built upon the sitar sounds that George Harrison began experimenting with on the set of <em>Help</em>. The sitar plays in modal patterns, similar to the modal forms that lie behind medieval chant. The music itself is meditative and nostalgic. It hearkens back to an ancient time, one as enduring as well-crafted wood, even as it breaks new ground in the pop music world. Thus, it typifies where The Beatles appear to have been in their own lives: busy, pressured in love and business, rushed, seeking secure ground (even in the bathtub), always amid innovation. Harmonically, the song begins and stays on A, an obvious key center, while the melody descends one octave from E to E, with a riff that begins E F# E D C#. (Ravi Shankar characteristically tuned his sitar to C#). The lyric, in wistful recollection, begins “I once had a girl, or should I say she once had me.” It moves into sounding “sh…” (“she showed”) and “oo” (“her room, isn’t it good, Norwegian wood”). The singer’s attitude toward the girl is perhaps somewhere in between “grrr” and “ooo.” He bides his time, drinking her wine. She is in a hurry; she has to work in the morning. He appears to wish for nothing more than to find permanency and rest, but there is no chair. Now there is only the memory.</p>
<p>Personal memory fills several of The Beatles’ songs. It anchors them in a fond and secure recollection while they are plunged into the hectic swirl of Beatlemania. For example, the specific locale of a roundabout in Liverpool, Penny Lane, is a memory lane that helps The Beatles to reconceptualize their own roots and identity as they are increasingly swept up in London and the music business. </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong><span style="text-decoration:underline">Yesterday: The Beatles, Narrative and Memory</span></strong></p>
<p><strong><span style="text-decoration:underline">Notes</span></strong></p>
<ol>
<li>Pierre Nora, <em>Realms of Memory</em>, Introduction, i-iv.</li>
<li>Holwachs, Maurice. <em>Social Frames of Memory</em>. Quoted in Kimberly Smith, “Mere Nostalgia: Notes on a Progressive Paratheory,” <em>Rhetoric and Public Affairs</em> 3.4 (2000): 517-18.</li>
<li>Bourdieu, Pierre, <em>Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste</em>, trans. Richard Nice, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. Pp. 113-20. Cited by John Story in <em>Cultural Theory and Popular Culture</em> pp. 159-60.</li>
<li>Williams, Raymond. <em>The Analysis of Culture in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture</em>, ed. John Story, London: Pearson, pp. 32, 36-37. See also Williams, <em>Culture and Society</em>. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.</li>
</ol>
<p>5. Criticisms of The Beatles’ peace and love themes are mentioned in several accounts. See Henry W. Sullivan, <em>The Beatles</em> <em>with Lacan: Rock n’ Roll as Requiem for the Modern Age</em> (1995), Bob Spitz, <em>The Beatles</em>. (Boston: Little Brown, 2006),Devin McKinney, <em>Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History</em> (2003), David Quantick, <em>Revolution: The Making of The Beatles’ White Album</em> (2002). </p>
<p>6. Pierre Nora, <em>Realms of Memory</em>, Introduction, i-v.</p>
<p>7. Ibid.</p>
<p>8. The Beatles Love album liner notes were written by Giles Martin, who produced the album with his father, Beatles producer, George Martin.</p>
<p>9. Dominick LaCapra,</p>
<p>10. Pierre Nora, p. 5</p>
<p>11. Pierre Nora, p. 7</p>
<p>12. Dominick La Capra,</p>
<p>13. Dominick La Capra, Rethinking, p. 52.</p>
<p>14. Ibid.</p>
<p>15. Kenneth Womack, “The Beatles as Modernists,” <em>Music and Literary Modernism</em>, ed, Robert McParland. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006. P.223. This essay is intended as a conversation with Womack’s essay.</p>
<p>16. Kenneth Womack, “The Beatles as Modernists,” 228.</p>
<p>17. Gary Burns, cited by Kenneth Womack in “The Beatles as Modernists,” 229.</p>
<p>18. Annette Hanes and Ian Inglis, 182, cited by Kenneth Womack in “The Beatles as Modernists,” 227.</p>
<p>19. Kenneth Womack, 227.</p>
<p>20. Kenneth Womack, 229.</p>
<p>21. See Kenneth Womack’s discussion of “A Day in the Life,” 232-33.</p>
<p>22. Kenneth Womack, 233.</p>
<p>23. Halbwachs, Maurice, quoted in Kimberly Smith, 517-18.</p>
<p>24. Paul McCartney has said that he saw the phrase “Memory Almost Full” on his cell phone.</p>
<p>25. This is Andreas Huyssen’s phrase. See Andreas Huyssen, <em>Present Pasts</em>.</p>
<p>26. Andreas Huyssen, p. 94.</p>
<p>27. The Beatles “Love” album liner notes by Giles Martin.</p>
<p>28. See Andreas Huyssen, p. 94, and The Beatles Love album liner notes.</p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042401
2013-12-13T12:42:24-05:00
2020-02-01T15:04:36-05:00
Christmas Music
<p>Happy holidays. You may listen here songs from to <em><strong>The Season</strong></em> with Bob McParland, Rave Tesar, Anthony Liguori, Paul Ferraro and others at <strong>bobmcparland.com</strong></p>
<p> </p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042399
2013-09-08T13:22:37-04:00
2019-12-19T07:31:45-05:00
Music In American Life Encyclopedia To Be Published
<p>Bob McParland's article on "American Songwriters" will appear in the <em>Music In American Life Encyclopedia</em> which will be published later this month by ABC-CLIO/Greenwood.</p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042398
2013-07-08T09:11:55-04:00
2019-12-19T07:31:45-05:00
Dickens and Opera
<p>"Dickens and Opera, " an essay, appears in <em>The Human</em>, a new online journal from Turkey. You can read the essay at <a href="http://www.humanjournal.org/index.php/issues/current-issue" data-imported="1">http://www.humanjournal.org/index.php/issues/current-issue</a></p>
<p> </p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042394
2013-06-05T09:30:30-04:00
2019-12-19T07:31:45-05:00
New Book Is Published- Film and Literary Modernism
<p><strong>A new book, <em>Film and Literary Modernism</em></strong>, has been published. It is available at Amazon at <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Film-Literary-Modernism-Robert-McParland/dp/1443844500" data-imported="1">http://www.amazon.com/Film-Literary-Modernism-Robert-McParland/dp/1443844500</a></p>
<p>The book is now in libraries in Great Britain, Denmark, Hong Kong, Australia, and at many locations throughout Canada and the United States.</p>
<p>The book is also available from Barnes and Noble and from the publiser at <a href="http://www.c-s-p.org/flyers/978-1-4438-4450-5-sample.pdf" data-imported="1">c-s-p.org</a></p>
<p><img src="//d10j3mvrs1suex.cloudfront.net/u/431109/0c687d432835b31b48c6ff0e9f1a0162b8b2d1da/original/9781443844505.jpg/!!/b%3AWyJyZXNpemU6MjAweDI4MCJd.jpg" class="size_orig justify_inline border_" alt="9781443844505.jpg" height="280" width="200" /> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042397
2013-05-09T12:09:53-04:00
2019-12-19T07:31:45-05:00
A Musical Memorial
<p>A musical memorial for Pat Ciaverella takes place this Saturday evening, including musicians Paul Ferraro, Rave Tesar, Anthony Liguori, Mike Baron, Nancy Quinn, Dave Corsello, Carol Sharer, Bob McParland and others.</p>
<p> </p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042396
2013-03-06T10:41:50-05:00
2019-12-19T07:31:45-05:00
Celebrating a Birthday With a Concert and a New Book
<p>On Saturday, March 2, I enjoyed working a show with Mike Baron (percussion) at the CS/Barn, Faith Reformed Church, 530 Sicomac Avenue, Wyckoff, New Jersey. The book <em>Film and Literary Modernism</em> is now listed on Amazon (US and Canada), Barnes and Noble, and the CSP website will be published later this month. </p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042395
2013-02-19T13:01:37-05:00
2019-12-19T07:31:45-05:00
U.K. Singer/Songwriter Semi-Finalist
<p>Some recent news: My song "She Believes in Elvis" was the semi-finalist in the recent United Kingdom song contest. (That and $10 should get me to Hoboken.) I guess I will have to play it at the birthday show on March 2.</p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042393
2012-10-24T04:25:41-04:00
2019-12-19T07:31:45-05:00
Santa Cooking Up A Storm for the Holidays
<p>"Cooking Up a Storm" (Words and Music, Bob McParland) with a vocal by Anthony Liguori can be heard on WRFC and other stations during the months of November and December. This was recorded for a Christmas album.</p>
<p> </p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042392
2012-10-17T09:18:46-04:00
2021-06-28T22:29:46-04:00
Do You Believe In Rock and Roll- Book on American Pie Published
<p>"American Pie," Don McLean's fascinating and cryptic song, is viewed as an expression of a moment in cultural history by Bob McParland in an essay in a new book: <em>Do You Beleive In Rock and Roll? </em></p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042391
2012-06-19T13:37:49-04:00
2019-12-19T07:31:45-05:00
"Finding Fogerty" and "Do You Believe in Rock and Roll- Don McLean's American Pie": Two New Books on the Horizon
<p>Two new books are planned for Fall 2012:</p>
<p><em>Finding Fogerty- Interdisciplinary Readings</em>, ed. Tom Kitts, Lanham, MD.: Lexington Books, 2012, includes Bob McParland's essay: "John Fogerty's Imagined Southern Gothic."</p>
<p><em>Do You Believe in Rock and Roll? Don McLean's American Pie</em>, ed. Raymond Schuck Sr. and Raymond Schuck Jr., Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Publishing, 2012, includes Bob McParland's essay: "A Generation Lost in Space."</p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042388
2012-06-08T16:29:45-04:00
2019-12-19T07:31:45-05:00
Poydras Review Publishes Poem
<p>"Obituary for a Tramp" appears in Poydras Review June issue online.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.poydrasreview.com" data-imported="1">http://www.poydrasreview.com</a></p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042390
2012-06-01T16:33:10-04:00
2019-12-19T07:31:45-05:00
Springsteen Conference Announced
<p>Bob McParland will present "The Rhetoric of Hope: America, Authenticity and the Lyricist's Path Out of the Darkness on the Edge of Town" at the Springsteen Conference in Monmouth, New Jersey in September.</p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042389
2012-06-01T16:29:17-04:00
2019-12-19T07:31:45-05:00
Short Story "Tundra" Appears in SLAB Issue 7
<p>The short story "Tundra" by Bob McParland appears in Issue 7 of Slab (Sound and Literary Art Book).</p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042387
2012-04-16T10:34:10-04:00
2019-12-19T07:31:45-05:00
One Act Play Featured at "Quickchange: An Evening of Short Plays" in Rutherford Little Theatre, Monday, April 23, 7 P.M.
<p><em>An Open Book</em>, by Bob McParland, will feature actress Karen Elliott of the Broadway cast of <em>Les Miserables</em>. The play will be staged at the Little Theatre, Montrose Avenue, Rutherford, New Jersey, with other one acts, beginning at 7 P.M., Monday, April 23. A play by Marina Peraino will also be presented. </p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042384
2012-04-05T16:05:57-04:00
2019-12-19T07:31:43-05:00
Yesterday:The Beatles, Narrative, and Memory
<p>"Yesterday: the Beatles, Narrative and Memory" - Essay in <em>Resounding Pasts</em> (CSP, 2010)</p>
<p>The Beatles, possibly the most popular and influential music act of the past century, wrote and sounded a cultural moment. From 1963 to 1970, the years of their recording output, they were engaged in significant cultural work. Their artistry and awareness was deeply in tune with a transformation of culture and popular music. In memory, their music, image, lyrics, and ideas have become a cultural legacy that remains steadily with us. Because of their continuing relevance, it is necessary to explore how we remember The Beatles. Memory studies provide us with a lens through which we can investigate their cultural impact upon the generation of listeners who first experienced them and those who encountered them later. The Beatles signify a generation: the wonder, passion, and energy of people who met a world of change during the 1960’s. One recreates the sixties in listening to The Beatles. They act as a catalyst for remembering this time in specific ways. The Beatles recall for many people the vitality, dreams, and struggles of a not too distant past: a time of dramatic upheaval characterized by issues of war, civil rights, and shifting lifestyles. The significance of memory to The Beatles themselves and to their listeners will be examined through theories of memory from Pierre Nora’s Realms of Memory and Dominick La Capra’s considerations of holocaust memory. The work of The Beatles calls us to reexamine the points that Nora and La Capra have made. In this essay, I will first examine how the theme of memory appears as continually relevant to The Beatles in their writing and music. Memory is at the center of many of the songs of The Beatles. From “Yesterday” to “In My Life” and “Penny Lane,” The Beatles set out maps of personal memory. As The Beatles memorialized their personal past, they created a treasure of memories for their listeners. Considering this impact, in the next part of this essay, I will offer the view that audiences have used the music of The Beatles to remember things they have lived through. Each Beatles song, becoming popular, has acted as a cultural marker for its audience, a thread amid the pattern of yesterday. As a widespread cultural phenomenon, The Beatles participated in creating history and consciousness. The Beatles’ songs, as literary texts, continue to act as a framework for memory and have a role in the formation of cultural memory as they enter public discourse. The participation of their audience records memory as their lives intersect with The Beatles’ songs. Thus, their music has entered what Pierre Bourdieu refers to as “the cultural field,” a unique space of family frames, personal life-histories, and class and aesthetic differences. [note 3] Listeners to The Beatles continually re-read them, producing social knowledge and discourse. They circulate meaning through interpretation of common texts and celebrate deeply felt emotions that emerge from memory. The original Beatles audience recalls with what Raymond Williams has called “a particular community of experience” and “the structure of feeling.” Subsequent audiences of The Beatles interact with this recollection of a “common element.” [note 4] Finally, we will look at the continuing importance of The Beatles at the present time. In doing so, we can see that The Beatles provided a public text that continues to be widely circulated and reconstructed. Their music has become a site of memory. This is true for people who lived through the 1960s as well as for a generation of listeners who have been born afterward. Parents and their children have discovered in The Beatles a common bond. Even as The Beatles, in their time together, transformed and recast themselves, today The Beatles are recast for new audiences in multiple ways. From their pop songs of 1964 through the innovations of Sergeant Pepper (1967) and The White Album (1968) to their closing days of Abbey Road and Let It Be, The Beatles changed visually and musically. Now, through the remastering of their recordings and films, the sale of t-shirts and memorabilia, and concerts by Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, The Beatles’ legacy is reconstructed and passed on to future generations. These new placements of The Beatles texts have prompted re-readings of The Beatles and revisions of cultural memory. This practice is consistent with the revisions of history and recovery of areas of history that have brought increasing emphasis upon memory. Pierre Nora speaks of the sense of “belonging, collective consciousness {…} memory and identity.”[ note 6] He suggests for our period the term “the age of commemoration” (4). As Nora puts it, “the most continuous or permanent feature of the modern world is no longer continuity or permanence but change” (5). [note 7] For The Beatles themselves, rapid change or an “acceleration of history,” to use Nora’s term, appears to have prompted a desire for memory that appears in several of their songs. This may also be true of their audience, for whom a reinvention of The Beatles texts in the Beatles Anthology, the Beatles’ Love album, or anticipated digital availability brings yesterday alive again in fresh and new ways. The relative permanence and familiarity of The Beatles enables their audience to cope with change. [note 8] In his introduction to Realms of Memory, Pierre Nora tells us that “history is needed when people no longer live in memory but recall the past through the assistance of documents that help to recall it” [note 1] Much about The Beatles is within living memory but the band also exists in recorded documents that trigger personal memory. The recordings of The Beatles today continue in a lively conversation with culture. Their work continues to be represented and documented in new media forms and is soon to be digitized for today’s listeners. The Beatles have crossed boundaries and cultures. They have entered “social frames” of memory. Because of this it is important for us to consider how memory is embodied and enacted in the image, the lyrics, and the music of The Beatles. Then, by setting them within their historical and social context we may further investigate through memory theories their lasting impact on their audience. That is the work of this essay. I. The Beatles crafted many of their songs in an attitude of recollection and often set their lyrics in the past tense. Here we arrive at la Capra’s first two points: the relation between authorial intention and the text and the relation of the author’s life and the text. La Capra argues that life and text may challenge one another in a complex interaction (Rethinking 60-61). For The Beatles, the increasing pressure of the music industry at the peak of their success called for a turn toward memory which helped them to situate themselves. The Beatles obviously intended to create pop music. Their primary thrust was sheer creativity, an impulse to produce songs. At first they rewrote Little Richard and Elvis and the rock and roll of the late 1950s. Then they participated in writing an integral portion of the soundtrack of the 1960s. The vision and musical sound of The Beatles shifted during their time together. While John Lennon, in particular, moved toward songs that expressed a socio-political awareness, The Beatles appear to generally not have intended to make large social statements. We can gain some perspective on what they were trying to say through their interviews. Biographers on The Beatles have speculated on the intentions that lay behind their songs. However, a search for the relation between authorial intention and the Beatles’ texts has to be guided by a close reading of their own comments about their craft. There is a relation between the lives of The Beatles and their songs. However, we may never know to what extent John Lennon’s wry imagination transformed the encounters which prompted songs like “Norwegian Wood.” Clearly, his imaginative playfulness sends his narrator to crawl off to sleep in the bath to elude his erstwhile love, as he sings, “Or should I say, she once had me.” The Beatles bring to this song music with a nostalgic quality. This song is built upon the sitar sounds that George Harrison began experimenting with on the set of Help. The sitar plays in modal patterns, similar to the modal forms that lie behind medieval chant. The music itself is meditative and nostalgic. It hearkens back to an ancient time, one as enduring as well-crafted wood, even as it breaks new ground in the pop music world. Thus, it typifies where The Beatles appear to have been in their own lives: busy, pressured in love and business, rushed, seeking secure ground (even in the bathtub), always amid innovation. Harmonically, the song begins and stays on A, an obvious key center, while the melody descends one octave from E to E, with a riff that begins E F# E D C#. (Ravi Shankar characteristically tuned his sitar to C#). The lyric, in wistful recollection, begins “I once had a girl, or should I say she once had me.” It moves into sounding “sh…” (“she showed”) and “oo” (“her room, isn’t it good, Norwegian wood”). The singer’s attitude toward the girl is perhaps somewhere in between “grrr” and “ooo.” He bides his time, drinking her wine. She is in a hurry; she has to work in the morning. He appears to wish for nothing more than to find permanency and rest, but there is no chair. Now there is only the memory. Personal memory fills several of The Beatles’ songs. It anchors them in a fond and secure recollection while they are plunged into the hectic swirl of Beatlemania. For example, the specific locale of a roundabout in Liverpool, Penny Lane, is a memory lane that helps The Beatles to reconceptualize their own roots and identity as they are increasingly swept up in London and the music business. ©Robert McParland, 2010. This is a portion of the essay that appears in Resounding Pasts, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011. Yesterday: The Beatles, Narrative and Memory Notes 1. Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory, Introduction, i-iv. 2. Holwachs, Maurice. Social Frames of Memory. Quoted in Kimberly Smith, “Mere Nostalgia: Notes on a Progressive Paratheory,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 3.4 (2000): 517-18. 3. Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. Pp. 113-20. Cited by John Story in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture pp. 159-60. 4. Williams, Raymond. The Analysis of Culture in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, ed. John Story, London: Pearson, pp. 32, 36-37. See also Williams, Culture and Society. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963. 5. Criticisms of The Beatles’ peace and love themes are mentioned in several accounts. See Henry W. Sullivan, The Beatles with Lacan: Rock n’ Roll as Requiem for the Modern Age (1995), Bob Spitz, The Beatles. (Boston: Little Brown, 2006),Devin McKinney, Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History (2003), David Quantick, Revolution: The Making of The Beatles’ White Album (2002). 6. Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory, Introduction, i-v. 7. Ibid. 8. The Beatles Love album liner notes were written by Giles Martin, who produced the album with his father, Beatles producer, George Martin. 9. Dominick LaCapra, 10. Pierre Nora, p. 5 11. Pierre Nora, p. 7 12. Dominick La Capra, 13. Dominick La Capra, Rethinking, p. 52. 14. Ibid. 15. Kenneth Womack, “The Beatles as Modernists,” Music and Literary Modernism, ed, Robert McParland. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006. P.223. This essay is intended as a conversation with Womack’s essay. 16. Kenneth Womack, “The Beatles as Modernists,” 228. 17. Gary Burns, cited by Kenneth Womack in “The Beatles as Modernists,” 229. 18. Annette Hanes and Ian Inglis, 182, cited by Kenneth Womack in “The Beatles as Modernists,” 227. 19. Kenneth Womack, 227. 20. Kenneth Womack, 229. 21. See Kenneth Womack’s discussion of “A Day in the Life,” 232-33. 22. Kenneth Womack, 233. 23. Halbwachs, Maurice, quoted in Kimberly Smith, 517-18. 24. Paul McCartney has said that he saw the phrase “Memory Almost Full” on his cell phone. 25. This is Andreas Huyssen’s phrase. See Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts. 26. Andreas Huyssen, p. 94. 27. The Beatles “Love” album liner notes by Giles Martin. 28. See Andreas Huyssen, p. 94, and The Beatles Love album liner notes.</p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042383
2012-04-04T16:57:40-04:00
2021-08-12T13:06:30-04:00
Poetics of American Song Lyrics
<p>The Poetics of American Song Lyrics (ed. Charlotte Pence, U. of Mississippi Press, 2012)is a breakthrough book in the study of song lyrics and poetry. Alongside reflections on the work of Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Michael Stipe, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and others appears my essay "Facing the Music: The Poetics of Bruce Springsteen"- a somewhat 'impressionistic' essay in which I look at "Born to Run," "Darkness on the Edge of Town," and "The Rising."</p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042385
2012-04-04T16:08:28-04:00
2022-04-05T16:23:16-04:00
Caught By a Spell: Iron Maiden's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
<p>Caught By a Spell: Iron Maiden’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner- An Essay on the Band's Adaptation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." (Published 2009) </p>
<p>The postmodern is sometimes said to flicker ephemerally, sliding us over a slick surface without depth or history. In contrast to empty simulacrae, Iron Maiden’s Powerslave (1984) offers us history, myth, presence and power and a path to differance in that Orwellian year. Closing with “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” a thirteen and a half- minute song-epic based on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1797 poem, this album did not scatter one’s subjectivity on postmodern surfaces. Rather, Iron Maiden infused listeners with musical and lyrical nostalgia for wonder. Iron Maiden sought transcendence in that liminal space between high culture and pop culture, myth and materiality, and cracked through the bland, conforming surfaces of Thatcherism and Reaganism. If “The World Is Too Much With Us” in its scope and ambition, as Wordsworth’s poem of that title claimed, Steve Harris’s reworking of Coleridge’s poem was a modernist metal tour de force that renewed modern life in driving rhythms and mythical imagination. Iron Maiden takes up Coleridge’s haunting poem about recollection. Shifting into new keys and tempos, they decenter the narrative, placing the song after the title cut about an ancient Egypian king. We listeners are invited into other times and places, into a region of wonder that collapses history and replaces it with an overlapping bricolage in which all times are one. History is no longer linear and hegemoic, but cyclical, as in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner itself. This panoply of affective changes, images, and sounds mirrors the displacement or dislocation of history, as Robert Walser has observed (53-54). Yet, in its resistance to this decenteredness, the Ancient Mariner enacts the quest for unitive mystical experience in which, as the mystics say, all times are one and all history is now. This quest reflects Deena Weinstein’s assertion that metal’s “core audience really seeks a true ecstatic experience,” one that “removes the everyday-life world” (214). The weaving of sound and myth in Iron Maiden’s song, reflecting that bricolage that Robert Walser has viewed as postmodern, is akin to this quest for unitive vision, in which all time is present in the mystical moment. To listen to Iron Maiden’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is to be entranced. The listener is absorbed in the guitar lines of Dave Murray and Adrian Smith, Bruce Dickinson’s vocals and theatricality, Steve Harris’s forceful and extraordinary bass lines and Nikko McBrain’s driving rhythms. Like Coleridge, Iron Maiden’s members give themselves up to visions and offer dreams and gesture toward extraordinary consciousness. They explore “tensions between reality and dream,” as Robert Walser has pointed out (152). The stories of an ancient Egyptian king, or that of an Ancient Mariner, draw listeners toward unusual and mythical realms of thought. With Iron Maiden’s songs on Powerslave, listeners are invited both into narratives and into other times and spaces, into a region of wonder. To listen is to be caught by a spell as Iron Maiden’s Powerslave enacts the romance of metal. In their songs, Iron Maiden embraces the power of mystery that is found in mythology, astrology, alchemy, esoterica, war, dueling, or the Biblical Book of Revelation. Heroism and mishap clash as Iron Maiden’s music powers through songs, in tension and release, echoing a sense of a struggle for survival. The band reaches for the breakthrough vitality conveyed in technically precise octave leads, or dual guitar lines. Throughout Powerslave there is a battle for vision and life, an appropriation of symbols of power and quest for what Robert Walser has identified as the “experience of power and transcendent freedom” that can overcome the anxieties and discontinuities of the post-modern world” (55). Songs represent what Deena Weinstein has seen in metal as “challenges to the sources of disorder, fighting the good fight” (41). There is a call to the heroic journey, a summons to adventure and wonder. Formed through “the dreams and ambitions” of Steve Harris, Iron Maiden’s adventure began when they were offered a record contract in 1976, if they were willing to “go punk.” (Wall 10-15, Christe) However, in the early days of the band, with vocalist Paul Di Anno, there was an innovative sound that broke with British punk and Iron Maiden went their own way. They adopted the Faustian heavy metal attitude that Philip Basche began to document in Heavy Metal Thunder, which appeared shortly after Powerslave in 1985. Iron Maiden, with Sanctuary (1980), Killers (1981), and The Number of the Beast (1982), took a turn toward power chords, lyrical leads, motivic development, Gothic mysticism and horror. On Powerslave, repeatedly, the band’s musical arrangements echo their songs’ lyrical content. Amid darkness and combat, songs seek vitality, action, transcendent flight, and heroism. For example, there is sword and sorcery in Dickinson’s “The Duelists” and an overcoming of duality, as music, lyrics, and sound are woven into one, in the duel of guitars. “Aces High” and “Two Minutes To Midnight,” both of which were hits on the U.K. charts, recall with fierce energy the Battle of Britain and a fight with impending doom. Iron Maiden brings their audience images from literature, history, and myth to reflect human aspiration. “The Rime” also bears one line from Tennyson (“water, water everywhere / nor any drop to drink”). Tennyson’s poetry also appears in the 1983 hit “The Trooper,” a version of “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” a poem referring to heroism and mishap. In 1986, Iron Maiden pointed to Alexander the Great, paraphrasing Plutarch in their opening lines: “My son, ask for thyself another kingdom, for that which I leave is too small for thee” (Plutarch, Alexander 6.8). Such an appeal to the heroic and to the attempt at flight is found in “The Flight of Icarus,” and, perhaps more successfully in “Aces High.” Listeners were fascinated by Iron Maiden’s Powerslave (1984). Rich in energy and drive, the record borders on being a concept album. It signals the band’s awakening tendency toward progressive metal. On Powerslave, producer Martin Birch and the band create an atmosphere of energy and mystery. From the striking beginning of “Aces High,” launched by the fierce guitars of Adrian Smith and Dave Murray, the record dwells in narrative and mythology. Steve Harris’s lyrics tell stories and touch upon themes that recall myth, heroism, science fiction, and ancient worlds. The lyrics suggest struggles: a duel for life in the 1984 world. The ancient mariner suggests a kind of mental and spiritual entrapment. On the title song “Powerslave,” an Egyptian Pharoah wonders why he has to die when everyone around him is telling him that he is a god. There is a Romantic nostalgia for ancient worlds and a yearning for more vital prospects. The Music It is significant that Harris, a bassist, a musician from the rhythm section of the band, was the composer who adapted and set Coleridge’s poem to music. Harris’s bass emerges as a lead instrument and sets rhythmic patterns in novel ways. His experiments with rhythm correspond with the experimentation that lies at the heart of the romantic poetic enterprise. Harris, who Iron Maiden biographer Mick Wall identifies as the creator of “the songs, the idea and attitude” of the band (14), plays an instrument that anchors many bands and establishes rhythmic figures within a song. His development of Iron Maiden’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” attends to themes of growth, decay, change, and dynamism. This song-poem is a narrative ballad that captures a movement in time through varying time signatures. Chords, guitar hooks, rhythms and melodies engage listeners with energy, or evoke haunting atmosphere. Iron Maiden and producer Martin Birch create an atmosphere that is by turns energetic and haunting. Iron Maiden’s song is haunted, washed in sound, driven forward by Steve Harris’s basslines much like the Mariner’s boat has been driven by the sound made by spirits. As in Coleridge, the band’s version emerges with spell-like, incantatory patterns. The song is filled with highly coordinated transitions and carefully timed tempo changes that maintain interest across more than thirteen minutes. The motifs demand change. They push, like the Mariner, toward horizons and vary from a dynamic and energetic pulse to a haunting middle. There is order in the crashing guitars, just as there are patterns in waves breaking. We are held spellbound by Iron Maiden’s music much in the same way that Coleridge’s wedding guest is held spellbound by the Ancient Mariner’s story. With rhythmic shifts we move between tension and release. Tonal relations organize the piece and riffs supply melodic figures, motifs that push the song from one tonal area to another. The song moves in a manner consistent with Romantic form. The establishment of a dominant tonal center and mood is followed by a departure. The song comes back home, recalling an earlier musical theme, and then moves with a difference. It recalls the past but explodes into new exploration. Iron Maiden takes us on a journey. The spell comes over us as motifs build, diminish, and then return. Musically, the song is carefully structured. The song opens explosively with a guitar run of five sixteenth notes landing on an E. Immediately, it begins to travel on a driving pulse in E that is established by Steve Harris’s bass. Several measures into the song, at nine to ten seconds, the opening guitar riff returns, punctuating the driving march pattern in a circular phrase of quick eighth notes repeating the first four notes over and over, then resolving at the end of the phrase on E. Here the rhythmic pattern is doubled by bass and by drums, as McBrain rolls across several tom-toms. Dickinson’s vocal follows, beginning the lyric with words like “mesmerizes,” “trance,” “spell,” “nightmare,” that suggest a haunted oceanic consciousness. “Hear,” he says in the first line. “See,” he says in the second. We are called to be witnesses by opening ourselves to listen and to see the vision of the mariner. The song rocks into tightly executed riffs about three minutes in. As Dickinson continues the story, the dominant harmonic and rhythmic pattern breaks up and the bass begins doubling notes in cut time in rapid sixteenth notes. This hugely energetic bass- driven movement continues until 4:58, where the bass stops. It is somewhere after five minutes has passed that the eerie interlude begins and the song dips down into an atmosphere propelled by Steve Harris’s bass. The “spacey” interlude begins with guitar-like bass arpeggios, a creaking deck, and the narrative voice-over. Dickinson’s singing/speaking is gentle and an entranced hush appears to have settled over the song. This is the mariner’s moment of repentance: music and character change together. At 7:30 a melodic bass functions again much like a guitar and the singing resumes. Then at 8:40, a scream erupts from Dickinson-mariner for about ten seconds, ending in a grisly laugh. The band burst out with a return of the bass pattern followed by a burst of lead guitar. The bass begins to accelerate and the singing resumes, accompanied by guitar riffs. Some listeners have found the middle of the song to “sag.” However, the spacey interlude provides musical contrast and suggests alternative consciousness. As a movement, it dwells in the uncertainty of the musical journey before it recapitulates and returns home. From the quiet bursts a fitting climax: a guitar leads breaks into life; with a powerful soloing, it sails across a stormy sea. There is a build up into the crescendo in this final third of this song. Some nine minutes into the song, the tempo increases, a lascivious laugh issues forth, and the band pulses into blistering solos. From this exuberance comes the return to a motif from early on in the song. At ten minutes, as if carefully timed for 10:00, the guitars move into lyrical octave leads that are anchored by bass and drums. Thirty seconds later (at 10:30) they join the bass pattern. At 11:00, we return to the original bass pattern, announcing musically the return of the mariner, breaking from his nightmare, coming home to a newfound wholeness. This is indeed a musical return and there is a rejoicing of intertwining guitar leads. The story is told and brought to a culmination, rising to climax and we breathe again. The song ends after 13:20, as its final line drifts: “And the tale goes on and on and on,” suggesting that it never ends. This story has an enduring quality because the recounting of it perpetually is the mariner’s penance. Likewise, Iron Maiden concludes with the suggestion that neither will the echo of this album or its legacy end. The Lyric Steve Harris’s reworking of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is a tour de force. Harris’s lyrical compression, summary, and careful selection of elements from Coleridge’s poem organizes the way in which Dickinson’s vocal works within Iron Maiden’s sound. The listener is invited to listen to the story, entranced by music that complements the words Dickinson sings: “mesmerises,” “nightmares of the sea,” “caught by his spell.” Dickinson becomes the conjurer of the spell. Incantatory patterns emerge The poem is told by a haunted sailor who has been cursed for his crimes against nature: the shooting of the albatross. From its opening riff, the song demands attention. Harris deftly weaves Coleridge’s poem into a song lyric with summary and quotation, and supports it with ambitious composition, filled with rhythmic changes. The changing time signatures themselves remind us that music dwells in time and that the fortunes of the mariner hang suspended in changing time. The tale of the mariner is a lengthy story told by the mariner to wedding guests. He has shot down the albatross for sport and has doomed his crew to die at sea of thirst. The mariner repents and is spared but must tell his story over and over, wherever he goes. His theme is that one must be reverent and appreciative of the natural world and all creatures. Dickinson’s voice matches this voice of repentance in the haunting interlude and ultimately breaks into a blood-curdling scream. Many have called Iron Maiden’s song “an epic” because it lasts for more than 13:20. However, it is also epic-like because it tells a tale and proceeds as a recollection of a journey. Iron Maiden’s musical creativity provides a temporal unfolding. The lyrics set forth imagery and use sound to organize time. Bruce Dickinson sings: The Mariner’s bound to tell of his story, To tell his tale wherever he goes The Mariner’s story, like the tale of Odysseus, is a recollection. The romantic lyric poet is a singer and Dickinson projects a theatricality that makes this song work as a live performance. Dickinson’s vocal renders this narration dramatically, projecting the sense of Dyonisian ecstacy in performing of which he has spoken of with Weinstein (88). On the World Slavery Tour, Iron Maiden could unleash their virtuoso guitar playing, and Harris’s bass alongside Bruce Dickinson’s soaring vocals. The theatricality of Dickinson’s stage presence reflected the image of a Romantic virtuoso, such as Franz Lizst, of whom Eduard Hanslick once said, “ Not only does one listen with breathless attention to his playing, one also observes it in the fine lines of his face […] all this has the utmost fascination for his listeners” (Hanslick 110). Steve Harris’s lyrics and music record an experience and perform a reenactment of it. Iron Maiden’s rendering of Coleridge’s poem is quite consistent with Coleridge’s poetics. Meter and rhyme, says Coleridge, support recollection and a song or poem is memorable partly because of its sound devices and repetitions. There is “a rapturous or singing tone” in much of Romantic poetry, as Thomas MacFarland observes (383-87, 400-01). Dickinson’s vocal emphasizes this sense of rapture. Iron Maiden thus performs the work that Coleridge himself saw in the best poetry. Their song is one in which sound excites attention and meter and rhyme lift us from ordinary emotions and meaning. From the opening riffs, we are beckoned to listen. Dickinson launches into the lyric with a call: “Hear the rime of the ancient mariner.” “Hear” begins the first line, “see” begins the second. Dickinson has a great deal of story to tell. However, the song is structured to allow for a good deal of instrumental space apart from the singing of lyric. Following most passages of the narrative, guitar leads respond to the lyric. The mariner and Dickinson as vocalist are conflated: he will sing the story. “Stay here and listen to the nightmares of the sea.” As we accept the invitation, we are enrapt in the story, caught like the mariner in a spell. “And the music plays on” come the chorus and we are propelled into the tale. As the voyage begins, we are set upon a musical journey “to a place that nobody’s been.” In imagery of snow-fog we enter the chill of a “land of snow and ice” and we “see” the figure of the albatross, bird of good omen: “Hailed in God’s name/ hoping good luck it brings.” The chorus resumes – “And the ship sails on” – underscoring the interminable voyage. Then disaster strikes: The mariner kills the bird of good omen His shipmates cry against what he’s done The crew joins with him, however, and the spirit of the albatross exacts its vengeance upon them: “a terrible curse, a thirst has begun.” Blaming the mariner for their ill-fate, the sailors hang the dead bird like a weight, or talisman of ill-will, around his neck. “And the curse goes on and on and on at sea.” The lyric personalizes this thirst, as Dickinson-mariner sings “for them and me.” As in Tennyson’s poem, the speaker finds no means to slake the thirst. There is “water, water everywhere/ nor any drop to drink.” It is at this moment that the ghost ship appears. The narrator wonders at the sight: But how can she sail with no wind in her sails and no tide?” In sighting the ghost ship, the narrator again beckons to us: “See.” He asks for vision, pointing toward the ghostly ship of the doomed in the distance. The song is taken up in a living death, a liminal suspension. It is entirely appropriate that now a ghostly passage of musical change comes upon the listener. As the sailors drop down dead, so too does the music, into a haunted reverie. This is the quiet center of a tornado, the “eye” of the storm in which the mariner is held in abeyance, in an apophatic darkness before his awakening. Here music drops out of the vocal and the narrator tells us the tale starkly. As the deck creaks, fragile tilting wood upon a vast open sea, we are buoyed up into the misty atmosphere of the music. Dickinson sings: One after one by the star dogged moon Too quick for groan or sigh Each turned his face with ghostly pang And cursed me with his eye The gaze of the dead mesmerizes, as did the wedding guest in the opening lines of this song. The gaze challenges the speaker with dread. It is now a collective stare, charging the mariner with profound guilt. Sound is frozen here in a recollection of moments when the stunning hypnotism of this gaze cursed him “too quick for groan or sigh.” Music – and the human groan or sigh of emotion- has vanished and the soul once moved by music is paralyzed, suspended by this cursing challenge to “see.” Then we hear the “heavy thump” of bodies falling: life arrested, the vitality of music itself arrested. The mariner too wishes to die but the life force within, the natural world of the sea creatures and within himself lives on. And now, so too does a music of energy. It reappears, like the animation at the heart of creation. The mariner, now centered in a prayer for the natural world “blesses them/ God’s creatures all of them too.” The music revives: “Then the spell starts to break.” The weight of death eases and the bird around his neck drops away. Now comes sound and music again: “Hear the groans of the long dead seamen.” Their resurrection is accomplished along with musical rebirth. Again we are “Cast into a trance and the nightmare carries on.” The musical return comes with the transformation of the mariner. As in nineteenth century Romantic composition, Iron Maiden has orchestrated a series of movements away from the tonic and the motifs that the song opened with. There has been a difficult passage through musical tensions, changes in time signatures, and a modulation to a new key. Now the music comes home again with a difference. Strikingly, this return is very much in the mode of the mythical heroic journey, as outlined by Joseph Campbell and others. Such heroic myth echoes the flight of “Aces High” at the beginning of the album, bringing this recording full circle. And now the curse is finally lifted And the Mariner sights his home. The mariner is released from the “prison” of spirits, who “Form their own light.” A familiar boat sails toward him. “It was a joy he could not believe.” Ship and sin sink with the past into the sea. “And the hermit shrieves the Mariner of his sins.” The word “shrieve” is an archaic form of the Middle English word “shrive,” meaning to impose penance and grant absolution. Dickinson sings: “The Mariner’s bound to tell of his story/ To tell his tale wherever he goes.” It is a tale that goes on and on. Iron Maiden closes this album with the open-ended notion that what we have just heard also will go on and on. Iron Maiden’s Musical Adaptation Are we to read Iron Maiden’s transposition of Coleridge’s dark poem as a paean to wonder and imagination, or as a fearful warning of spellbound disillusion? How might Coleridge himself have heard Iron Maiden’s version? Likely, Coleridge would have appreciated Iron Maiden’s celebration of imagination. In the thirteenth chapter of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria critics see one of the most profound reflections on imagination in all of English literature. Perhaps with this in mind, the poet Robert Penn Warren, in 1946, called Coleridge’s “Rime” “a poem of pure imagination.” He argued that in the poem imagination itself is redemptive. Nineteenth century readers were often simply baffled, finding Coleridge’s poem ambiguous and weirdly mysterious. Heavy metal fans have responded in a variety of ways to Iron Maiden’s version. Steve Harris, however, appears to have found something in Coleridge’s poem that spoke to his time and expressed the image and role of Iron Maiden. The parallel between Coleridge’s mysterious poem and heavy metal culture is striking. In Iron Maiden’s song, imagination and sonic intensity seek peak experience, the pleasures of transcendence and awe. This however, comes with subjection to peril, to the grotesque, and the potential for anarchy. As Deena Weinstein puts it, “ideal metal concerts can be described as hierophanies in which something sacred is revealed” (232). In Iron Maiden’s song we encounter hypnotic dread, and recognize, as Weinstein has indicated, that “the focus on vulnerability to the horrors of chaos is a very significant feature of traditional heavy metal” (42). Mariner and singer welcome the listener into a state of vulnerability, an occult encounter with dread. The spell one is caught in is central to the band’s musical exploration. As Walser notes, “Iron Maiden is among the most mystical and philosophical of heavy metal bands” (151). With the song’s musical spell, Iron Maiden makes an appeal to something other-worldly. Clearly, Iron Maiden appeals to elements of the supernatural that pervade the poem. The poem’s journey through a kind of altered consciousness may also have encouraged Harris’s musical exploration. Harris likely saw the occult philosophy at work in Coleridge’s poem, as John Livingston Lowes noted in his influential The Road to Xanadu. Symbolic readings of Coleridge’s mariner are an important aspect of the poem’s critical tradition. They emerged with Maud Bodkin in Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934) and her view that the poem expressed the Jungian archetypes of rebirth. G. Wilson Knight in The Starlit Dome (1941) brought together psychoanalytic theory and Christian mysticism to expound upon the poem’s imagery. In Kenneth Burke’s and Richard Haven’s readings the mariner is a psychological projection by Coleridge of his own relationships and issues. There is something similarly psychological and symbolic in Iron Maiden’s treatment: an appeal to haunted consciousness and transformation. In the imagery of their lyrics and in the graphics on their album covers that feature their mascot “Eddie”, Iron Maiden frequently appeals to symbolic imagery. This symbolic imagery is very present in “The Rime” and throughout the Powerslave album. W.H. Auden’s socio-political approach to the poem may suggest something else beyond these psychological approaches. Auden observed that the ship is a symbol of society. Following Auden, we might suggest that in Coleridge’s poem- and perhaps in Iron Maiden’s treatment- the state and society is creaking through an uncomfortable political and moral condition. Such a socio-political lens may provide us with another way of looking at Iron Maiden’s voice in 1984, as an indirect comment of life in the Thatcher government’s Britain. This is particularly relevant when one considers that the image of a decapitated Margaret Thatcher lies beneath the figure of Eddie on the cover of Iron Maiden’s Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. The political edge of Iron Maiden’s work is barely touched in Run to the Hills, the anecdotal biography by Mick Wall, or in Iron Maiden: Thirty Years of the Beast, the unauthorized biography by Paul Stenning. Neither make mention of the political context that Coleridge’s supernatural poem emerged from. As a young man Coleridge had been a ‘pantisocratic’ admirer of the French Revolution. Coleridge biographer Richard Holmes describes this as “a turning point” for all of Coleridge’s generation (33). With Powerslave, Iron Maiden, likewise, may have been expressing romantic ideals within what they experienced as a generally stifling social and political environment. Heavy metal is Dyonysian and rebellious, as Weinstein points out. It provides a “transvaluation of the values of respectable society” and, in her view, offers “a cultural coping mechanism.” It is “inherently vitalizing, to tweak a devitalizing, bureaucratic, inauthentic, iron-caged, and unfair world” (Weinstein 262-63). Iron Maiden’s appeal to heroism and the heroic journey is as fundamental to tweaking the world in our times as it was in the age of the Greek classics. It is an enduring aspect of that mythic core that Joseph Campbell identified in The Hero with A Thousand Faces. Yet, as in Campbell’s model, the hero setting forth faces initiation and encounters adversity, darkness, and peril. Could charismatic metal gods duel with chaos and disaster with sonic power and rhythmic innovation? We may wonder what goes “on and on” at the end of Iron Maiden’s last song on the Powerslave album. Is their rendition of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” an affirmation of redemptive potential for society? Or are they suggesting that the story that goes “on and on” is less promising? Critics have been divided about the message of Coleridge’s poem. John Beer, in Coleridge the Visionary, like Warren, emphasized the redemptive aspects of the poem. He also found sources behind it in the mysticism of Jacob Boehme, the allegory of Odysseus’s homecoming, and the ballad collections of Walter Scott. However, other critics suggest there is only interminable retelling and a radical disjunction. Does Iron Maiden, with its adaptation, hold out a concern about alienation with a hope for the possibility of a new coherence? It appears that they achieve what Warren, referring to Coleridge’s poem, once called “expressive integration.” It has often been said that artists are among the first to articulate what is “in the air” in a society. If this is true in Iron Maiden’s case, what was the band saying through this album about consciousness in 1984 Britain? What cultural memory of heroism were they attempting to evoke in “Aces High” or with the Odyssey of the Ancient Mariner? In what sense was Iron Maiden positioning itself as “romantic” and “heroic?” Does Iron Maiden reflect “the romantic ideology” that literary critic Jerome McGann was writing about at the same time? Mc Gann reaffirmed that Coleridge’s poem dwells within romantic ideology and is Christian-redemptive in its theme, as well as Hegelian. In Harris’s compression of Coleridge we can in fact see this ‘Hegelian’ three part structure of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, or musical statement, drift to another key and time signature, and return to a new synthesis. All of this reflects the Romantic tendency in musical form. As Weinstein notes, British new wave metal, deriving from bands like Iron Maiden and “famous for spiritual themes and strong tenor vocalist, often borrows from nineteenth century symphonic music” (289). As in many of Beethoven’s works, beginning with his Third Symphony “Eroica,” one experiences in Iron Maiden’s songs on Powerslave a contestation with chaos. The poem and Iron Maiden’s musical adaptation appear to gather up the minstrel tradition, themes of imagination, the role of the Gothic, the fated hero, nostalgia and the melodrama that are all at work in English Romanticism. Gothic terror, the reality of death, a sense of the natural world, and nightmare are all figured in poem and song. So, in our “willing suspension of disbelief” as listeners, are we meant to hope for resolution? Does this journey through the “archaic, inhuman, uncanny” liminal world of the mariner bring us to a point of hope in the end? Or, does it interminably dance with chaos – on and on, forever? As Odysseus once recalled, there is ambiguity in a heroic journey. Iron Maiden made use of the archaic, the symbolic, and the imaginative reach of mythology. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” fit well with the “heroic” motifs throughout their album, as well as with the notion of being enslaved to powers, as is the ancient Egyptian who speaks on the title track. Further, the Coleridge poem provided the band with a vehicle for instrumental virtuosity. Their song, like this poem, makes a journey across the boundaries of speech. Music is brought to bear upon the difficulty with language that critics have noted in the poem and this music underscores the poem’s theme of transformation. “The Rime” is truly a performance piece. Dickinson’s vocal invites a reader response/ listener-response approach in which we experience the song as in a dialogue with us. The Rime also gives the band an opportunity to shine as soloists. Dickinson, in particular, becomes the “ventriloquist” that critic Max F. Schultz saw in Coleridge. Dickinson adopts this alien voice of the mariner and makes it his own, projecting it toward us. It is a song of mesmeric power. Each time one listens to it, in memory, Iron Maiden takes the stage again and the story goes on and on and on…</p>
<p>Works Cited</p>
<p>Auden, W.H. The Enchafed Flood, or Romantic Iconography of the Sea. New York: Random House, 1950. Basche, Philip. Heavy Metal Thunder. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1985. Beer, John. Coleridge the Visionary. London: Chatto and Windus, 1959. Bodkin, Maud. Archetypal Patterns in Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon Press,1934. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949. Christe, Ian. Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal. New York: Harper Collins, 2003. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. _____________________. Collected Works. Haven, Richard. Patterns of Consciousness: An Essay on Coleridge. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1969. Holmes, Richard. Coleridge, Early Visions 1772-1804. New York: Pantheon, 1989. Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 1990. Knight, G. Wilson. The Starlit Dome. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941. Lowes, John Livingston. The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927. MacFarland, Thomas. Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition.Oxford: Clarendon Pressm 1969. McGann, Jerome. The Romantic Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Iron Maiden. Powerslave. _____________. Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. Schultz, Max. F. Poetic Voices of Coleridge. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963. Stenning, Paul. Iron Maiden: Thirty Years of the Beast. Chicago: Independent Publishers Group, 2006. Wall, Mick. Run to the Hills. London: Sanctuary, 2004. Walser, Robert. Running With the Devil- Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Middletown, CT.: Wesleyan University Press, 1993. Weinstein, Deena. Heavy Metal- The Music and Its Culture. New York: DaCapo, 1991, 2000.</p>
Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042386
2012-04-03T16:10:24-04:00
2021-07-14T21:32:06-04:00
Music in the Post 9/11 World
<p>Music in the Post-9/11 World Ed. Jonathan Ritter and J. Martin Daughtry New York” Routledge, 2007.</p>
<p>Sound travels at 770 miles per hour. On the bright morning of September 11, 2001, when tragedy struck lower Manhattan and Washington, D.C., sounds of shock, grief and fear reverberated widely and quickly. Media brought the violence close that morning. Wherever we were, it cast us, near and far, as witnesses to a vivid and disturbing spectacle: a harsh disruption of our world. Above where I stood that morning, about five miles from the acrid smoke and dust rising from the collapse of the World Trade Center, a military jet raced low, rocketing noisily toward the city. Like the pulse and sonic trace from that jet, this book presents echoes. It recalls the songs and voices rising from many quarters following the impact of these events and challenges us to think about a world of diverse responses. As an earthquake brings aftershocks, ripples, and rumblings, so the distressing events of September 11, 2001 brought responses across the United States and around the world that registered in music, media, and public consciousness. The disparate essays that comprise this collection study the cultural aftermath, both in and outside the United States, and the global repercussions and interpretations that emerged alongside subsequent conflicts. This volume eloquently sounds reflection on the politics, memorializing, commercializing, and redefining of this significant moment in history. On the book’s cover rise two towers of 100 plus colorful and anonymous CD: a world of music recalling the vertical reach of the twin towers. Like the signals that once bounced off those towers, carrying music and voices, these twelve essays, forward, and introduction, also send messages. Emerging from an ethnomusicological study, this book appears to call to a Western or American readership that is keenly aware of music and media and remains curious about how these intersected with the commercial and political atmosphere of the United States after September 11, 2001. For most readers, the book’s second section will move them from the familiar to the less familiar. From Peru to Egypt and from Morocco and Senegal to Mexico, this book moves on to the wider world in which a “cosmopolitan orientation has permeated the lives of people in even the most seemingly remote and traditional societies.” In his introduction, J, Martin Daughtry suggests that we read these essays by “placing them in dialogue with each other.” This invites an intertextual exchange and reader participation that welcomes us as a community of interpreters and encourages reading a variety of discourses through a method of comparison and contrast. Insofar as the “America: A Tribute to Heroes” concert was, as Kip Pegley and Susan Fast note in their essay, “an attempt to reconfigure an imagined community that had been distorted by the trauma,” so too this book suggests the possibilities for enhancing ‘community’ through a reflective dialogue on music and cultural media. As Daughtry says at the close of his introduction, this is “a reflection on the historical moment in which this volume was produced and the place of musical scholarship in the post 9/11 world.” It appears to hold the hope that this world of ours is not only engaged in a “clash of civilizations,” as Samuel Huntington (1996) has remarked but also bears potential for a global dialogue. It appears to be a premise of this book that the increasing proximity of economies and ideologies we sometimes call globalization calls for a reinvestigation and reanimation of the traditional role of the humanities: to further humanize our world with critical multiculturalism as we listen to each other and share our music and our lives. While these contributors observe our contemporary encounter with the use of music in nationalistic contexts that may be potentially divisive, their essays also move one to recognize the hope that music might act as a vehicle for healing in our world. Reebee Garofalo starts us off with an overture that sets forth themes that will be picked up in the next seven essays in the first section: America’s national politics, societal values, and the contradictory functions that music has served in American history. The “American mediascape” is viewed alongside the “new political context.” As she points out, music’s social role after 9/11 emerged with the “gentle patriotism” of the “America: A tribute to Heroes” broadcast and continued with the “Concert for New York City.” The latter, she observes, carried amid assertions of confidence a theme of revenge that was amplified by Bon Jovi’s song “Wanted Dead of Alive” and The Who’s “Won’t get Fooled Again.” Garofalo adds that “artists who would have been identified with an oppositional stance in a previous era adopted new positions in response to a new political reality.” (Of course, time shows sonme of this to have been temporary and of the moment. ) Garofalo next turns to country music matters asnd goes on to express the view that corporate radio stifled dissent. These themes are repeated by subsequent essays by James Deaville, Martin Scherzinger, and and Peter J. Schmelz. Garofalo contends that “the restrictive and at times partisan practices of corporate radio were not the only reasons behind the lack of protest music on the national airwaves.” She probes whether the patriot Act “created a climate of intolerance for opposing viewpoints and caused many artists to censor themselves.” (This is the subject of Scherzinger’s essay.) Garofalo notes that “many artists interested in protesting the war turned to the Internet, often posting protest songs as MP3’s available for free download.” Then she reflects on Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising: the subject of a fine essay in this collection by Bryan Garman. Finally, Garofalo notes “hints of … dissatisfaction within the rap community” and recognizes rap and hip-hop : as the site of the most provocative political commentary in an otherwise timid and muted post 9/11 environment.” While Darryl Worley’s country song “Have You Forgotten,” analyzed here by Schmelz, can hardly be called timid, the initial essays of this collection appear to underscore Garofalo’s assertion of “the suppression and marginalization of voices resistant to dominant ideologies” in popular music in 2001-2003. In Pegley and Fast’s essay , attention is given to “the uncertain political and social climate” and the “role of popular music” after September 11, 2001. Conscious of music’s “ability to channel powerful emotions, they remind us that musical tributes and recollections could be found in every major media event in America: the World Series, the Super Bowl, the Olympics, and the Academy Awards among them. “America: A tribute to Heroes” is described as an event on 35 cable television networks and 8,000 radio stations that “through the power of celebrity, music and gesture… attempted to forge a unified American community.” Yet, as they write, Pegley and Fast explicitly acknowledge their own outsider subject positions as Canadians and recognize the merits of their access to both Canadian and American media. The effects of distance are perhaps more fully acknowledged here than in many of the essays of the book’s second section, in which the events of 9/11 are indeed seen from a distance and interpreted through a local lens. Pegley and Fast analyze “America: A Tribute to Heroes” and discuss its attempt to foreground community. They point out that this image of unified American community was reinforced by metaphors for community like the appearance of singer/songwriters like Neil Young or Bruce Springsteen with vocal choirs. This book itself may be seen as a similar metaphor for expanded community, as it urges openness to a broad spectrum of voices throughout the world. This collection takes up these initial threads and weaves them in interesting ways across the next several essays. James Deaville considers the sounds of television in the US and Canada, while martin Scherzinger reflects upon how some sounds may not have reached us because of self-censorshgip by artists or corporate censorship. The patriotic and commercial turns of commemoration receive Peter J. Schmelz’s keen examination, while the expression of classical music remembrance is considered by Peter Tregear. In between, we are treated by Bryan Garman to a well-written assessment of Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising with “the politics of fear, fame and faith”, his Christian themes, and his hope for moral and spiritual renewal. No one can miss James Deaville’s topic. Turn the page and it appears in caps and boldface. A discussion of the politics of the news media is soon followed by an examination of the use of music for the news. We are offered an analysis of how music is incorporated into news media formats. The advertisers that Deaville refers to appear rather pragmatic about this: for them, music is a persuasive medium. However, such programming carries with it some assumptions about how the music will be heard by different listeners. Whereas Leonard Meyer (1956) expertly considered the subject of music and emotion, these production companies confidently- and perhaps naively- express an approach to mood engineering through music in which musical styles are described as “majestic,” “hard hitting,” “jazz oriented,” and “timeless”: words that few musicologists would use without qualification. In contrast with Eduard Hanslick’s nineteenth-century aesthetics of music as objective form, this is music as the Brave New World will put it to use. Deaville inquires into whether “musical tapping into personal narrative can actually influence the audio-viewer of television news.” He asks, “Does television news music simply reinforce pre-existing audience sentiments in hopes of increasing market share, or does it actually convince audio-viewers of a specific position on the news?” Deaville asserts that, following 9/11, network executives expressed a strategy to argue for “just war” and to construct propaganda elements. The attention to the politics of popular broadcasting continues as Deaville takes up an examination of CNN’s musical theme. He believes that this theme “suited and indeed worked to engender an aggressive retaliatory politics.” We are given a musical transcription of CNN’s “fear and anger” theme: High strings send us to a high D and tympani and drums pursue an insistent pulse of sixteenth notes and triplets. Presumably, the “aggressive” music communicates message and meaning for an audio- viewer when it is attached to visuals and other sounds. One may ask, does music itself promote aggressive retaliatory emotions? Or, does this depend upon the context in which it is set? Deaville directs our attention primarily to the placement of this music. What is quite interesting is his observation that the same music and imagery was received differently by Canadian viewers and listeners and American ones. In Deaville’s view, whereas American media appeared to foster “a climate of fear,” Canadian networks prompted sympathy. While not a great deal of empirical evidence appears here to support this, it is a very interesting perception. We read through the lens of this comparison as if we are glancing across the border on the bridge beside the chasm of Niagara Falls: This is the reaction of the U.S. side. This is the view from Canada. Deaville takes us to the view from Canada’s CBC Newsworld and its trademark “cymbal swells and rolls” and he reasserts that CNN and CBC “reveal contrasting subject positions through distinct musical responses to 9/11,” positions that “helped shape the mood of each nation.” Martin Scherzinger inquires into the “invisible and interiorized” phenomenon of self-censorship by artists and expresses concern about corporate censorship on broadcast channels. He is concerned with “the paradoxical nature of musical censorship… its double voices” and the silencing of dissent. He considers the removal of the Dixie Chicks from the ariwaves by several radio programmers in 2003. Then he considers the Boston Symphony’s decision to cancel a performance of John Adams’s The death of Klinghoeffer. Scherzinger critiques the silencing of public dissent in the public space of radio, including Clear Channel radio’s “don’t play” list of 156 songs. He challenges that broadcasting corporation’s contention that their decision was based upon grassroots censorship. In his view, “while grassroots flak probably played some role,” corporate ownership influences media content and there was a “bond between the owners of Clear Channel and the Bush administration.” For us, the question arises as to how this affects art, free speech, cultural expression, and what is available to audiences. Scherzinger’s concern with “signs of musical constraint” and “the limits of artistic expression” post 9/11 are paralleled by Peter J. Schmelz’s intensive analysis of Darryl Worley’s song “Have You Forgotten?” Schmelz’s investigation further accentuates Scherzinger’s thoughts on “how the behavior of culture commodities in a particular climate discloses the political standards of our times.” Schmelz documents how the meanings and reception of Worley’s song went through changes. Thus, he explores the song’s “role as a political agent” in support of “dominant political actions and ideologies.” His goal is to look at how this country song and its performance connected with the political moment. With this analysis, he says that he is exploring “country music’s audience and country music’s possible meanings, as well as broader questions of signification and representation in popular music.” Of course, country music is not univocal and the genre’s “increasingly visible links with conservative politics” is offset to some degree by groups like The Dixie Chicks. Schmelz takes us through the public life of Worley’s song from his Ole Opry performances in January 11-12, 2003 and its live version to the later success of his studio version. He provides evidence that the “political environment directly affected the recording and the video.” The video is examined in some detail. Schmelz also provides an analysis of Worley’s vocal delivery, the timing of the song’s release, and some aspects of the song’s musical arrangement. He notes, for example, that “the glissando suggests a rocket attack or missile shot, the countrified sounds of war.” Schmelz acknowledges that “there is no way to measure the direct influence of Worley’s song on public opinion (but) given its ubiquity it certainly played a noteworthy role in the media environment...” His essay calls for “further examination of the political and class roles of country music” in recent years. It attests to the view that popular music can support “dominant ideologies” and that “official’ voices “deserve as much scrutiny as the resistant voices on the margins, if not more so.” The subject of music and commemoration returns in Peter Tregear’s essay “For Alle Menschen?” which concludes the book’s first section. Tregear investigates the public uses of classical compositions to add a quality of gravity and sublimity to memorials for the victims of September 11. As one reads of the public use of Bach’s Suite for Unaccompanied Cello in C minor, Mozart’s Requiem Mass, and John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls, one may be prompted to ask what the use of these pieces says about popular perceptions of classical music or classical music’s role in cultural memory. In what sense is transcendence suggested by these compositions? Is classical music repertoire to be reduced to a mere commemorative function? Tregear reflects upon music’s role in making public rituals approach the condition of cinema. He points out that “Music is by its very nature radically removed from the events it might be chosen to accompany.” That is, absolute music – music without words. program, or image- “avoids a direct mimetic relationship with historical events.” However, this aesthetic view that music in itself stands outside “any unambiguous assertion of fact or feeling” does not exempt it from political or historical interrogation. As Tregear notes, “the use of this music… remains undeniably a political act worthy of interrogation, notwithstanding both the magnitude and depth of grief that it might be seen to help to articulate or console.” We are led to examine this music as a kind of post-nationalist discourse, suggesting a space where music meets the universal, an expression on these occasions that gestures toward a communal authenticity. Or, as Tregear puts it, the “presumed otherworldliness” of this music and “qualities such as nobility or theological gravitas” lies behind its use. Like other authors in this volume, Tregear perceives “how musical artifacts help to define a sense of collective identity.” In Part Two, we are given a global picture through ethnomusicology. As J. Martin Daughtry says in his introduction, we are invited to “a sonic world that will be startlingly new to most readers.” We are here welcomed to hear voices of people outside the United States who have “reread and interpreted through the lenses of decidedly local cultural practices.” We travel with these essays to the rural Andes in Peru where, as Jonathan Ritter notes, “one’s local existence is shot through with traces of distant worlds.” On we go to Morocco and Senegal, to Mexico, Egypt, and Afghanistan to consider how the events of September 11, 2001 and afterward have been [perceived and translated into musical and cultural expression in these diverse locations. As Ritter explains, these emergent narratives offer instances of discourse that reveal “disjunctures of global communications” and “global fissures within a variety of responses to mass media. These writers investigate the different ways in which the events of 9/11 have been understood in multiple sites of interpretation. They demonstrate to us how the view changes according to “where one sits.” Ritter’s essay probes how peasants in a remote area of the Andes reflected upon 9/11 for a song contest and saw it through the lens of the turbulence and violence that they have been faced with in their own experience. For all of their geographic distance from the events, the deep authenticity of their response in anchored in their own struggle. In Ayacudo’s Fajardo Province carnival song contests, or concursos, provided them with an arena for their efforts to make sense of that experience. Carnival also provided a public space where they could protest dehumanization and attempt to transform it through art, music, and sound. Tellingly, Ritter also discusses his personal odyssey in which he, the questioning ethnographer, was now asked questions about the 9/11 events in America by concerned people in the city of Ayacucho and in the rural Fajardo province. The personal anecdote here well conveys the intersubjective space of empathy he speaks of. Ritter demonstrates how Andean peasants “position themselves as global citizens, emergent cosmopolitans, knowledgable and willing to comment on world affairs” As he writes, “These songs reflect an effort to place ‘their’ and ‘our’ experiences of terror on the same dialogic ground, promoting an ethics of empathy.” One might add that this may well be a rationale for this entire book. The dialogue continues as ---- Blumenfeld offers oinsights into Moroccan and Senagalese music that accompanies spiritual traditions. He suggests that his colleagues at Columbia University came to the conclusion that cultural solutions may have a chance to succeed in fostering dialogue whereas other means have not succeeded. The first striking tones of his essay are sounded in the captions which precede it. Notably, there are Hazrat Inayat Kahn’s claims of a spiritual or universal dimension to music and Susan Sontag’s rejection of what she has called “the disconnect between Tuesday’s monstrous dose of the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and T.V. commentators.” Blumenfeld suggests that “the simplicity with which they framed the event and its aftermath” soon “appeared to stifle intelligent, open, and complex discussions of the issues at hand.” Blumenfeld appears to support the apparent intent of this collection to be open to multiple perspectives when he observes that there are “vast gray areas of identity and intent” which were not included, or were perhaps negated by certain sectors of politics and media. The writer thus joins the voices of those contributors who early in this collection roundly criticize this univocal media. Meanwhile, we are welcomed to a discussion of “the mysterious Islamic traditions of Sufiism” that are being explored by Senagalese singer Youssou N’Dour and at the Fez Festival of World Sacred Music in Morocco. The work of this musical artist and this world music event are explored as expressions of this diversity of perspective. They are situated as examples of “the efficacy of music as a tool to bridge cultural and religious rifts.” Blumenfeld quotes Faouzi Skali, a Fez-Sufi scholar, who has pursued the use of the arts and a film festival “to initiate a direct dialogue between people and cultures, not through the news media.” The author recalls Hazrat Inayat Khan’s view that music is “the divine art” and that “Sound alone is free of form.” The spirit of Fez in America is something that Blumenfeld sees as a potent form exceeding “the customary contexts for so-called world music.” These spiritual traditions are given further attention in Blumenfeld’s inquiry into the work of Youssou N’Dour, an artist whose voice in multinational discourse draws upon ancient modes of Sufi, Sengalese griot, and contemporary communications. There is hope in these examples that music and cultural expression can say far more than Islamic fundamentalist rhetoric and may be a vehicle to encourage reconciliation. John Holmes McDowell, a professor of folklore and ethnomusicologist, is the next voice that we hear from. McDowell explores Mexican ballads sung in response to 9/11. These laments emerge in their won context and express attitudes of folk commemoration. They also emerge from traditions of folk song as social-political commentary. We learn from McDowell some of the history of this, as he takes a look at five post 9/11 corridos, observing that they do not speak in a single voice. James R. Grippo, an ethnomusicologist who performs Mid- Eastern music, next investigates Egyptian sha’bi and listens to his Egyptian interlocutors saying, “I’ll tell you why we hate you.” On a personal level, Grippo recalls the sincerity of the people he spoke with in Egypt and their sympathetic comments following 9/11. He tells us that he felt “humbled by those who felt the need to apologize to me” as an American. However, such sympathetic attitudes have shifted following U.S. military action in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is “a reaction to a reaction,” he says. An Egyptian love for American pop culture notwithstanding, he perceives among these Egyptians a “mistrust of… the way 9/11 has been used to advance… U.S. foreign policy.” In the final essay, Veronica Doubleday focuses on Afghan singers’ use of music to denounce the Taliban and its Pakistani supporters. The history of Afghani musical traditions are presented carefully in relation to the emergent politics of this war torn region. We hear of solo heroic epics that now receive political treatments. Doubleday points out that Afghan political music is composed mostly by men. However, we learn of some of the songs that have been coming from refugee camps in Pakistan. There are themes of lamentation emerging from Persian and Pashto poetry and art. Doubleday also discusses works that have emerged past the conflict period to express satire, wit, and verbal inventiveness in storytelling. She shows how the use of the technique of asking questions, using animal imagery, and expressing traditions provide reference to a shared milieu and assist in the work of social criticism. Doubleday considers the exiled musicians of Afghanistan and their impact in the world. She notes music education initiatives in Kabul. She probes the tensions between conservative Islamic values and secularized modernity and Western influence with respect to music and cultural expression. Overall, this book itself is a response. The editors have provided here a launching pad for critical thought on the diversity of responses in the post- 9/11 world. On the whole, this is a book of global hope. It is a book that is engaged not only in examining the complexities of music and media but also in encouraging us in the venture of transcultural dialogue. It enlists us in the hope for a community that will listen carefully to the sounds of social difference, political engagement, and interpersonal connection.</p>
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Bob McParland
tag:bobmcparland.com,2005:Post/6042382
2012-04-01T16:03:53-04:00
2019-12-19T07:31:43-05:00
Springsteen and the American Soul
<p>Bruce Springsteen and the American Soul has been published. The book is filled with insights into Springsteen's music and his cultural impact. Previously, I have written on Springsteen's first albums: Greetings from Asbury Park, the Wild, the Innocent and the E-Street Shuffle, and Born to Run. For this volume, I chose to give attention to Devils and Dust and the Seeger Sessions. Editor David Garrett Izzo has pulled together a wide array of writers to create this book. Bruce Springsteen and the American Soul: Essays on the Songs and Influence of a Cultural Icon(Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2010).</p>
Bob McParland